Hide and Leak
BP’s Cleanup Is More Like a Cover up. Holding the Company Accountable Will Require Digging for the Truth.
On July 15, BP managed to finally seal its broken Macondo wellhead and stop the oil that had been hemorrhaging into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days. The very next week, as I was driving up the Florida coast, locals kept pointing out to me where cleanup workers were packing up and pulling out. From Crawfordville through to Carrabelle, and Port St. Joe to Pensacola, the booms were disappearing, the crew tents folded up and removed from beaches.
The well had been capped, after all. The gusher had stopped. Game over. Everyone can go home, right?
Not even close. If all goes according to plan, the relief well should provide a more permanent fix. But that hasn’t been the nature of this disaster. Every time BP thought it had the solution, something somehow went wrong. At the time of this writing, at least one oil seep had sprung in the ocean floor near the well as the pressure from the plug found other releases; methane, too, looked to be leaking. And BP was, once again, dodging the government’s requests for more monitoring.
The capping of the geyser will not, unfortunately, mean the end of the Gulf disaster. Don’t forget that it took nearly a month after the blowout for the first oil to make landfall. The oil-and-chemical mix will be coming ashore in the water and on the wind long after the relief well delivers on its promise.
I don’t share that fact to be discouraging, but only to remind us all that, if we turn our backs on the Gulf now, we will lose the high stakes game that started on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon exploded. And I mean us – because every American has a stake in this game. This contest is about far more than dollars for damages; it’s about our country’s ability to hold big corporate criminals accountable to the public interest and ensure that they follow the laws we enact.
That’s going to be tough, especially given our national attention deficit disorder. The media will lose its focus soon and shift its gaze to the next catastrophe. Politicians will be tempted to move on to other agendas. But the environment may not recover for years. And the political and legal effort to hold BP to its promise to “make it right” will take a decade at least – if not two.
Read more at www.earthisland.org
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